Cooking up a storm

In a few weeks' time, Gordon Ramsay and his new protégée, Angela Hartnett, will open an Italian restaurant at the Connaught - that bastion of traditional British values and French cuisine. And already the criticism has started. Belinda Richardson meets them both

We are sitting in Claridge's. Gordon Ramsay, the former Rangers footballer and famously foul-mouthed chef, is prodding a piece of roasted monkfish. "It's a lot better-looking than it was yesterday, when it was swimming in the sea," he says to Angela Hartnett, his latest protégée and the woman he has chosen to run his new Italian restaurant at the Connaught from September.

Mark Sergeant, the head chef at Claridge's and another Ramsay disciple, has come out of his kitchen to check on the King of Greece's party. "You look gorgeous, Ange," he says, as he passes our table - which, incidentally, is attracting rather more attention than the King's.

Perhaps that's not surprising. Ever since Ramsay rained abuse on his staff in a Channel 4 documentary called Boiling Point, he has had a reputation for ferocity that clearly fascinates the punters. He might look, close up, a bit like a copper-haired Dale Winton, but with that huge face and those Popeye arms and big, butcher's hands, there is no doubting his enormous physical presence.

"You look dog-tired, Mark," says Angela to the head chef, giving him a big smacker on each cheek and a tomboyish thump on the arm.

"Chefs . . ." she says, turning to me and putting her head in her hands. "All they talk about is cars. But it doesn't really bother me, all that macho stuff."

"It's true," says Gordon. "She doesn't take any rubbish from anybody. What you see is what you get."

What you see is a youngish bright spark (Angela is 33), with strawberry-blonde hair, a face full of freckles, shiny emerald-green eyes and an incredibly well-ironed shirt, considering that she is fresh off the night flight from Dubai.

Her toenails are newly buffed with what looks like Chanel's Vamp and she is on her second application of aloe vera hand cream, pressing it into the half-moons of her thumbnails with the same precision with which she might squeeze sweet pastry into the corners of a flan tin.

"Angela has an assertiveness that demands perfection," says Gordon. "The Connaught is a great sleeping beauty of a hotel and we are going to put the slippers on Angela's feet and regenerate it. You wait and see. This woman is a female Alain Ducasse. We haven't had anyone like this for years."

"Rubbish," she says, squirming.

"All right then - the new Elizabeth David," says Gordon. "She doesn't cook with pictures, but with flavours. And if anybody can silence our critics she can."

Ever since it was announced earlier this year that Gordon Ramsay would be moving in to the restaurant at the Connaught, there has been a certain amount of public outrage. His critics, to whom he is known as Flash Gordon, argue that he is getting too big for his boots: they question his capacity to run a restaurant in Chelsea while also overseeing Petrus, Claridge's, the Connaught, and his interests in Glasgow and Dubai.

Others, including the actor and writer Stephen Fry, argue that the Connaught is a vital link to Britain's past, too much of which has been swept away with indecent 21st-century haste and efficiency. They want to see it stay just as it is, frozen forever in aspic.

"I've nothing against Gordon Ramsay," Stephen Fry was quoted as saying earlier this year. "I think he's a great chef. But there are thousands of Italian restaurants in London and there's only one Connaught. It's unique, in the tradition of Cesar Ritz and Escoffier, and it's a terrible shame that, just because the revamp of Claridge's was a financial success, people feel the need to repeat it here."

"Oh come on! It makes me cry, that sort of thing," says Gordon. "Times move on and so must the Connaught. I had breakfast there this morning and I couldn't believe they'd cut the crusts off my toast. We've moved on as a nation. Better than that, we've moved on from Paris. So there will be no bechamel and no jellies. We're going to have proper cooking."

Historically the favoured venue of aristocrats, millionaires and statesmen, the Connaught has been a benchmark of classic French gastronomy for more than a quarter of a century. This dowager hotel has also long been an oasis of old-fashioned standards of service and a potent symbol of Britishness.

Walking through its doors was like going back in time to a safer, cosier era, when ladies wore hats and gents wore suits. The atmosphere was clubby and exclusive. The Connaught was identified with all that was refined and luxurious in metropolitan society.

But perhaps Gordon Ramsay is right. Times change. Even before the alleged "bovver boy" of British haute cuisine had got his mitts on the polished silver and the oak panelling, the Connaught had already begun to succumb to 21st-century commercial pressures.

Since the millennium, the hotel had introduced an "all-day sandwich" to its bar menu - before that it was cucumber only, thinly sliced. It had asked the designer Nina Campbell to revamp the lounge and it had opened a fitness studio.

"They were like this at Claridge's, though," says Gordon. "They said: 'Oh, no - he's going to come in and ruin it.' When all I've done is get rid of the dribble mats and the waltzing."

Actually, what Gordon Ramsay has done at Claridge's goes rather deeper than that. In the kitchen, he has installed a group of highly skilled professionals, along with some steel fridges and several vast ovens that look like safes and seem capable of feeding half of Mayfair. In the restaurant, with the help of the designer Thierry Despont, he has conjured up a relaxed, unforced re-creation of a grand period hotel dining-room. All, apparently, without any blood, tears or tantrums.

Gordon Ramsay admits that ever since the screening of Boiling Point, his reputation as a bruiser has been an albatross around his neck. "It's true," he says. "In service, I am a bastard, because the food has to be right. I'm not running a poodle parlour. But I'm not always a bastard."

Looking at him today, I believe it. Yes, with that bashed-up, weathered brow, he looks like he could still hold his own at Ibrox Park; and, yes, he has a confidence in himself that comes across as arrogance. But the man has pulled off a few tricks at Claridge's. So why shouldn't he do the same at the Connaught?

Whether or not he'll ever be able to rid the Connaught's dining-room of that curious smell - paraffin from the lights on the lamb trolley, mixed with old socks (albeit gentlemen's socks) - remains to be seen.

Hartnett certainly won't be cooking any more consomme en gelee Cole Porter, sardines diablees or any of the other dishes favoured by the ex-chef, Michel Bourdin, whose cooking was so deeply rooted in the grand culinary tradition of Auguste Escoffier and so greatly enjoyed over the decades by Sir Alec Guinness and Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

True to her roots, Angela Hartnett's cooking will be mainly Italian. She is descended from a big Catholic family that originated in the village of Bardi, near Bologna, and grew up in Essex, where she lived above a fish-and-chip shop and learned to make pasta from her grandmother. But it was Marcella Hazan's Classic Italian Cookbook that was her real culinary wake-up call while studying modern history at Cambridge Poly.

Like most students, she left college in severe debt, but stayed in Cambridge, working for a while in the Blue Boar making burgers and chips, before a stint at the more upmarket Midsummer House and then the Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados. Due to a failed love interest, she was soon back and looking to do some stages in London. Enter Gordon Ramsay.

"I came home and wrote about 100 letters, I remember," says Angela. "One of them was to Gordon, who was just beginning to get some good reviews at Aubergine. Anyway, he gave me a job. Apparently, the boys in the kitchen had a bet that I would last only two weeks. In the end, I lasted a year to the day. I lost two stone and quite a few friends who couldn't cope with my long working hours.

"But, actually, it was Gordon who kept me going. He was always trying to send me home early when I looked tired. Contrary to what everybody thinks, he looks after his boys - and they look after him."

His staff may get a bit bruised along the way, but, for those who can stand the heat, loyalty brings its rewards. And as anybody who listened to his hammy choice of music on Desert Island Discs - Blondie and Kim Wilde - will know, deep down he's not a bruiser at all, but an old sentimentalist.

Apart from a brief spell working with Giorgio Locatelli at Zafferano, Angela has stayed firmly within the Ramsay loop since her Aubergine days. She went on to work with Wareing at L'Oranger, followed him to Petrus and then told Gordon she wanted her life back.

"It wasn't easy. But I have the best staff in the world there. None of them has an attitude. They just get on with their work." She digs into her handbag to pull out photographs of them. Indonesians, Filipinos, Indians, all smiling and hugging Angela. They are quite different to the penguin-suited old boy with the gently sweating brow who has just poured us another cup of coffee.

"He's from the Connaught," whispers Angela. "They are gradually bringing them here one at a time so they can see what it's like working in a Ramsay restaurant."

"They're going to have to learn that they've got to work past nine in the evening for a start," says Gordon Ramsay, suddenly sharp-eyed and authoritative. What he wants at the Connaught is the best.

Just as Alain Ducasse has redefined grand hotel dining in Paris, so Gordon Ramsay has succeeded in making it relevant to a new generation at Claridge's.

At the Connaught, he says, of course he will not take away the fine linen and the cut crystal. "All I want to do is to bring in a light touch, some stunning flavours and pocket-friendly prices," says Gordon.

"Yes, it is not going to be like the River Cafe, which is completely overpriced," says Angela, whose signature dish is ravioli stuffed with roasted pumpkin and amaretto. "And we're not going to replicate Claridge's. We've got enough of Gordon in London already. These menus will be mine and I'll be staying away from French flavours and sticking to Italian because that's what I know best. So why should I do anything else?"

For the next couple of months, Angela will be on a sort of culinary odyssey, trawling various food markets, bakeries, butchers' and crockery shops in California, New York, Italy and Spain.

"I've been in Dubai for a year and there is not much to revitalise your senses there," she says. "It's all mezze, shish kebabs, sun, sea and sex."

"In California, I hope to pick up some ideas for the conservatory, where we plan to open a coffee shop that will serve anything from roasted chicken to grilled fish and breakfast. And, in Spain, I hope I will get some good tapas ideas for the bar. Those stale crisps and old bits of curly melba toast will be the first to go when I arrive at the Connaught."

'You know I didn't ask for this job," says Angela, as we get up to leave for Carlos Place, where she and Gordon Ramsay are due to have their photograph taken. Unlike most chefs, she holds herself straight, with her shoulders back, rather than stooped over an imaginary stove. She looks much taller than her 5ft 8in.

"When Gordon first asked me, I said I didn't want to get involved," she says. "I said I wanted to settle down and have children, not work 18 hours a day, six days a week in a windowless basement. But he said: 'Open it and, if you're pregnant six weeks later, then do both.' "

Inside the Connaught, apart from the pasty-faced former Tory cabinet minister who is taking tea in the drawing-room, things have already begun to change. The usual low hum of muted conversation and the clink of polished silver on bone china can no longer be heard above the sound of drilling in the Grill Room.

There, the gold and green and the patterned carpets have gone, as have the blood-red roses and the pewter, as Nina Campbell gears up to inject a new lease of life into the place.

Downstairs, touring the kitchens, the bottle-washer takes a second look as we pass by and a girl spinning sugar gives us a smile. Other than that, nobody bats an eyelid. "I've been here twice, but they probably haven't got a clue who I am," says Angela. "Come September they'll know."

Over by the wine chillers, Angela recognises a pastry chef who, last time she was here, had been in tears following a family upset. She asks if everything is OK and tells him to take as much time off as he needs.

As we go back up, we pass a picture of Auguste Escoffier and I begin to wonder. Rather than turning in his grave, I think the great man might be rather intrigued by young Miss Hartnett. A little coarse on the outside, perhaps, but sweet and tender within - just like his famous mignonettes of quail. Just like her mentor.